cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/2333639
I was just forwarded this someone in my household who watches our server. That's it folks. I've been a hold out for a long time, but this is honestly it.
They want me to pay to stream content that I bought from my hardware transcoded also on my hardware.
I'll say it. As of today, I say Plex is dead. Luckily I've been setting up Jellyfin, I guess it's time to make it production ready.
Edit: I have a Plex Pass. More comments saying “Just buy a plex pass” are seriously not getting it. I have a Plex Pass and my users are still getting this.
And for the thousandth person who wants to say the same things to me:
- YES I know I'm unaffected as a Plex Pass owner.
- My users were immediately angry at it, which made me angry. Our users don't understand what plex pass is, and they shouldn't have to, that's why I had it. The fact that they were pinged even though it should have kept working is horribly sloppy
- Plex is still removing functionality. I don't care that "People should pay their fair share". If Plex wants to put every new feature behind a paywall, that's completely okay. They are removing functionality.
- "But they have cloud costs". Remote streaming is negligible to them. It's a dynamic DNS service. Plex client logs in, asks where server is, plex cloud responds with the IP and port of where server is located. That's it.
- "Good luck finding another remote streaming" - Again, Plex just opens up an IP and port. Jellyfin also just opens up an IP and port (Hold on jellyfin folks I know, security, that's a separate conversation). All "remote streaming" is is their dynamic dns. Literal pennies to them. Know what actually is costing them money? Hosting all of that ad-supported "free" content that they're probably losing money on.
In short, I don't care how you justify it. Plex is doing something shitty. They're removing functionality that has been free for years. I'm not responding to any more of your comments repeating the same arguments over and over.
I'm coming up on 5 years as a Plex pass owner, so my users and I will not be impacted by this change. In five more years if they asked me nicely to pay another $89 to support the service I would. Send me some stickers and put a badge on my server. I get a lot of use out of the software/service, as do my family members.
I will say, I am quite annoyed at the wording and audience of this email. Jellyfin is just not an option for me until there is excellent feature parity with Plex. I know they are a lot of Jellyfin fans here, in my opinion, Plex is a significantly better experience for me.
Couldn't have said it better myself. I used plex for free for the better part of a decade. Bought lifetime when a raise was coming and it was still $140 (kicking myself because at one point with a sale I was looking at something like $45).
I've used plex pass enough, and it's my main driver for all our entertainment outside of music and audiobooks that if they asked for some more money, I wouldn't care so much.
The ease of use, the UI, and remote access without having to jump through a bunch of hoops is worth it.
No shade to Jellyfin, but it's not nearly as dumb dumb friendly.
I've even been using it for music, and audiobooks works pretty well for iOS. The only real available android client for audiobooks (Chronicle) sucks pretty bad, and is no longer under support. Lots of bugs and it only remembers where I left off about half the time. I just ftp the books to my local device and use smart audiobook player for books.
For audiobooks check out Audiobookshelf. On my NAS I run it in Container Manager (Docker) and get the image directly from the built-in repo. I check for image updates every few weeks, though only to keep compatibility with the apps, as I don't notice new features. Very easy to set up, just make sure your folders are named correctly.
Exactly, most people that share co tent with others already have the Plex pass so this doesn't do anything to them or their users.
This change, is absolutely benign for the vast majority. Which means it's a desperate grab to make more money which will ultimately fail.
Check out the trend over time.
They removed plugins when it was a threat to them controlling their ecosystem, people were using them to pull from YouTube and anime sources directly. They were basically turning them into Kodi, but with benefits
They did the same thing with offline resharing. You used to be able to sync a bunch of crap to your phone, go on vacation and share it with your family from your phone.
Then they started obnoxiously tracking you under the guise that you could see what your friends were watching, but they changed their terms so they could sell your watch data to third parties.
Then they started putting ads into free remote watch
Now there's no more free remote watch.
As you said, this change is unlikely to make a big difference for anybody, so it's unlikely for them to make any serious money from it.
My personal guess is, they're sitting on a fuck ton of venture capital promises and those bills are coming due with the market becoming questionable.
They've done everything to the free crowd to increase revenue. If they are truly cash strapped, the next logical thing is to get all these people with lifetime passes to buy in again but on a subscription basis. That means they're either going to abandon the lifetime product like playon did, or find some other way to force everyone to pay monthly to watch their own content.
Nobody seen anybody needs to switch to jellyfin but you're going to need a backup plan because inside of the next year or two chances are Plex is not going to be recognizable to you.
I guess you haven't read the rest of the comments here :D
At this point I just wait and see. I have Jellyfin running in parallel, but the way remote sharing works there, basically requiring a VPN on every client device makes it a non starter for a large portion of my users and with the security situation of the Jellyfin Backend I don't feel comfortable making it available through my domain.
So for now I will just wait and see and hope that the Jellyfin fanbase could just chill a bit and stop gloating and high giving any time there's a Plex related news on here